Addressing the biggest inhibitors of business agility

Business agility is in! Look at all the books and articles on how wonderful life will be when your business becomes nimble. However, how easy is it to become more agile when you even target the four most prominent inhibitors lurking in your organization and drive you to maintain your own brand of as usual.

According to McKinsey and others, there are four main inhibitors that can destroy your plans and implementations of a more agile way of doing business:

• Underlying IT systems

• Corporate culture

• Organizational structure

• Business processes

Underlying IT systems

Your underlying IT systems can limit your agility without you even being aware of it. Creativity suffers in a digital world of ones and zeros. Once set up, everyone and everything should conform to your standards and not the other way around. Add to this the leverage effect of GIGO or Garbage In, Garbage Out, and an internal mail for everyone, based on a false fact or figure, and you can literally sabotage even the best-thought strategy. Finding that balance point between acting and reporting is now more important than ever.

Corporate culture

How aware are you of the written and unwritten rules that influence and often govern the way your organization interacts, both internally and externally? Like the proverbial fish out of waterCulture is something so transparent when you are in it that it is almost impossible to notice it until you are kicked out of it. As David Gerber wrote in his book “The E Myth”, you can either work “on your business” or look at it from the outside and work “on your business.” Can you guess which one is harder to do? To have an independent view of what you are doing requires training, but without even trying to look in your business You will never see how your own cultural behavior slowly suffocates your company.

Organizational structure

The older and larger your organization becomes, the more rules and guidelines for doing business “(Enter your company name here)“becomes. Add to this the added pressure on your IT systems and reporting structures and very soon it will take days to negotiate the paperwork and approvals needed to take a day of training or upgrade your PC. Look no further than how many laws are passed DAILY in every country on the planet and soon even law-abiding citizens are violating some kind of law or statute without even knowing it.

Business processes

There are a number of very successful processes, such as 6 Sigma, Lean Production, etc. They are designed to cater to major common factors relative to your average employee. However, this means that all outliers, entrepreneurs, and anyone at the forefront will be marginalized. If you are looking for a great way to stifle creativity and courage, look no further. If you are looking to encourage these achievers, you need to relax those critical bottlenecks where they feel constrained. Look no further than former telecoms giant Motorola and what happened when 6 Sigma took over the company. Designed by Bill White in 1966, this business process permeated the company to such an extent that many of the creative people who were responsible for Motorola’s success were driven into more creative pastures. Combined with a major financial storm or two, these factors were enough to cause the company to die first slowly and then more quickly.

Each of these inhibitors can kill any attempt to create a sense of agility in your organization. Combine them and your chances of pulling your business out of the clutches of as usual, drops to virtually zero. Why?

… because we are creatures of habit. As much as most of us like to talk about change, we are only really for it when it requires someone else to change. We love certainty and we build systems, cultures and behaviors to create that certainty, yet we constantly allow ourselves to be fooled by a false sense of security that our complex models provide. Look no further than Long Term Capital Management and the two Nobel laureates who nearly collapsed the financial system in 1996 because their investment model was not broad or robust enough to handle the larger than expected event of Russia defaulting on its bonds.

The key to meeting the challenges of these common inhibitors is to become agile. However, your agility must be an effective combination of strategic, operational, and relational tools and practices. Focusing on just one of these areas is like sitting on a one or two legged stool, neither stable nor comfortable and will leave you vulnerable to shocks you are not prepared for.

The biggest step you can take to begin the process of managing these inhibitors is to balance your application of agility tools from these three areas and focus your energy on the horizon rather than all your past accomplishments. No matter how good you once were, if your systems and culture are focused on KPIs that are based on history, you might miss the next big trend or financial storm that is coming. The market will not forgive you however wonderful you think your culture is. Ask Nokia, Motorola, DEC, and many other great latecomers. Think ahead, think Agility!